http://www.fortune.com/fortune/slideshow/0...3732-11,00.html Once a car guy, always a car guy. Stempel, a former Pontiac engineer, ran General Motors from 1990 to 1992—rough times for the company. Like John Akers at IBM, he was fired for his company's woes. Now he's capitalizing on the booming hybrid-car industry as CEO of Detroit-based Energy Conversion Devices. ECD designs battery systems for the major automakers—among other things—so Stempel still gets to peek under lots of hoods. "Someone asked me if I missed the vroom-vroom," he says. "But when you feel the get-go from electric or hybrid cars, you get the same kind of excitement."
